Beyond Good and Evil

Bill Bunbury reports from a recent symposium at the University of Western Australia which asks whether good and evil are moral absolutes or whether we're trapped within them. Scholars from Asia and Australia examine this theme in the context of recent history and diverse cultures.

Transcript

FX: Balinese music

Bill Bunbury: Hello, I'm Bill Bunbury, and welcome to Encounter, which this week comes from the University of Western Australia, which recently played host to a symposium discussing Culture and Society in the Asia-Pacific region, with speakers from many countries in our part of the world.

The symposium theme for 2003, "Beyond Good and Evil, or Trapped Within Them?", looked at how literature and language affect our understanding of an international situation which is increasingly dominated by slogans such as 'axis of evil'.

Were there ways of finding language that might help us understand each other better? And could literature broaden and deepen our understanding of 'the other' in a more polarised world?

The opening speaker was Bruce Bennett, Professor of English at the University of New South Wales, and based at the Australian Defence Force Academy in Canberra. Bruce and his Singapore colleague, Edwin Thumboo (and we'll hear from him later), had created the original forum Culture and Society in the Asia-Pacific region, back in 1982.

So part of Bruce Bennett's task in 2003 was to look again at Australian understanding of our neighbours and the rich and diverse cultures. And it was obvious that for him this meant more than just literary or artistic culture.

Bruce Bennett: Well I hope so. It seems to me that the study of the countries of our region, as we like to call it - and I'd like to come back to that because notions of a region are integral to this discussion - that these notions involve some sense of values, assumptions, understandings, and one of the big neglected areas of course, religions.

Bill Bunbury: Paradoxically we are actually talking about this at a time when these understandings are more important than ever, aren't they?

Bruce Bennett: There's no doubt about this. It seems to me that so much of popular journalism and popular talk reduces itself to the clash of opposites, and to a simplifying of the discourse that ought to operate, where people can see things in terms other than yes, no, this, but not that.

Bill Bunbury: What's your comment on the clash of opposites? Is this a necessary way to go or are there alternatives?

Bruce Bennett: Well Huntington's thesis has been pervasive, and I think that many commentators have pointed to its influence on neo-conservative thought. It's a dangerous thesis because it suggests strict division between, if you like, the West and another East. We've been through all that stuff before with Communism, now we have Islamism, and that to me is a step down the wrong track.

Bill Bunbury: I guess it reinforces the notion of a perpetual dualism doesn't it, which seems deeply embedded somehow in our psyche?

Bruce Bennett: It is deeply embedded. And there are I suppose, advantages, some advantages in power play. When feminism versus the kind of masculinism was in operation, there was an advantage for feminism in defining itself as a kind of counter-movement. Colonial, post-colonial, these kinds of divisions have generated advantage for people who have felt disadvantaged, I can see that.

But at the same time, the person who wants to take a broader view says, hang on, I mean these are not the only things. When I look at India or China, I don't see just one thing, and the region we live in is enormously complex and rich and interesting. And why don't we encourage ourselves and our listeners, our readers and so on, to feel that curiosity and wonder that ought to be there?

Bill Bunbury: You spoke about curiosity and there's a particular value in this for you, isn't there?

Bruce Bennett: There is. I mean curiosity-based research for example, is an aspect of research that's been sidelined in recent years, and it seems to me that it's an enormously important thing for people to feel interested about difference, and not to say, oh that's something other, that's something else, that's outside, that's not me, that's not the West. That's what we ought to be looking at.

And there's some advantage in thinking about other countries as exotic as well. I'm actually not one of those people who thinks that the exotic is something to be totally rejected. So curiosity, wonder, interest, is a two-way flow. I mean once you exhibit those qualities, as people in our conference are doing, then other people look for the interesting things in Australia. We are too easily defined I think, in terms of a bland and uninteresting country. This is a very interesting country and many foreign students find it so.

Bill Bunbury: Is there a way to see beyond the clash of opposites, the sort of moral absolutes which are being thrashed around in this symposium as we've been hearing? Are there ways beyond this, pathways we can look at?

Bruce Bennett: Well there certainly are. And I think our writers and film makers are among the best people to show us these directions, because they have imagination, because they have flair, because they use language in a living way, the best of them. Too often I think there's been a tendency to see intellectuals and artists as troublemakers rather than future makers, and it is possible for writers to see through and beyond the simplistic, rhetorical slogans.

Bill Bunbury: You could argue, couldn't you, that Australia is a media rich country? We've got good journalists who have perceptions of Asia, we can be told lots of information; we can be told, for example, that not all the people of Islam are Islamists or fanatics. But is telling enough?

Bruce Bennett: I don't think it is. I think language can tell and it can also excite and transform. I think I've said in the conference that the most important book published this year in my view, is Don Watson's book called Death Sentence: The Decay of Public Language. And in it, he quotes John Maynard Keynes, who says "Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assaults of thoughts on the unthinking." Keynes, of course, was somebody who got around amongst writers. He was an economist who believed in the sentence, the living sentence, and we can see transformation in another quote that Don Watson puts into his little book from Wallace Stevens:

They said you have a blue guitar,

you do not play things as they are.

The man replied, 'Things as they are

are changed upon the blue guitar.

So the transformation of reality in all sorts of magical and interesting ways through writing as through visual imagery, is very important.

Bill Bunbury: We've been hearing a lot of words, of course, and you place great value on words, and some of them come out as very simple utterances like "the axis of evil". Are we, in fact, also fighting, do you think, a war of words, as well as a war against terror?

Bruce Bennett: I think so. I think terrorism is something that's fought out on the intelligence battlefields through language, through slogans, through, depending on the audience, through a variety of subtle and sophisticated ways of winning hearts and minds - and that phrase which came into prominence during the Vietnam War, is not being used at the moment, but it's what underlies I think, so much of the information, misinformation and spin that we're seeing.

Bill Bunbury: Bruce Bennett from the University of New South Wales.

Inevitably discussion of the symposium theme, "Beyond Good and Evil, or Trapped Within Them?" tackled the central question of whether these concepts are absolutes and opposites. It was a point taken up by Professor of English at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, Santosh Sareen.

He began by citing the German philosopher, Nietzsche, who in 1885 asserted that we could move beyond good and evil, suggesting that concepts were socially determined and sometimes masqueraded as moral absolutes. I asked him how this was so.

Santosh Sareen: You know, when you say in a certain society in a certain culture, a certain thing is not regarded as immoral, now let's, for example, let's take the example of the Islam religion, where it is quite normal to have more than one wife. Now some people have done this, they have converted to Islam, so that they can have two wives. Now that is really moving, moving to an advantage to oneself, and making something moral which otherwise would be immoral.

Bill Bunbury: Now the Indian view is different, isn't it? It doesn't see good and evil in absolute terms.

Santosh Sareen: Yes. Indian understanding of good and evil is different because man in the Indian traditions of thought, has remained part and parcel of the larger universal cosmos, as against the Western part which, if it plays back to the Greek sophists who were the founders of the Western thought, has regarded man as central, and the measure of all things.

Bill Bunbury: So the Indian view is more based on a Hindu notion of your place within the natural universe?

Santosh Sareen: Yes. Actually it comes from the word ahlong anu, that is to survey: ahlong anu is look along, look along all things. All existent facts. So it is contemplation of reality, not discrimination in a rational order. That is the central core of the Indian philosophy, and the Indian schema is of cyclicity and simultaneity as against the Western linearity of time.

Bill Bunbury: How does this notion of equilibrium, as you've described it, play out in, say, our early 21st Century? We're looking at, for example, major disturbances in the world. We have a war that has just almost completed in Afghanistan, although there are still rumblings, and a war still going on in Iraq. You cited a relevance to these situations.

Santosh Sareen: Yes, what I was saying was that what is happening in Afghanistan or Iraq, we talk of the axis of evil, or September 11, are all examples of the disturbance in the equilibrium, and it is to be expected that action will go on till a new equilibrium is restored. I mean, this is something that comes out even in the episode of the Mahabharata, where there is an attempt to disrobe Dropedi and she reminds us that truth is essential to righteousness, and it is in truth when it is wedded to obstinacy.

Now in the case of the American parallel, there has been, we can see there has been, some kind of an obstinacy on the part of the American President, and equilibrium gets restored only after a new order sets in.

Bill Bunbury: I guess in the clash of civilisations, it would take both parties to perceive that, wouldn't it?

Santosh Sareen: Yes, of course, that is true. I mean when we come down to life realities, it is really different, and we find that - and this is happening in Kashmir for instance once again - that you find, you see outwardly again, if you take the example of Kashmir, the Indian Prime Minister is announcing steps to ease the situation, and then there is an expectation that the Pakistani Prime Minister or the President will announce the steps, and he has, for example, he announced a ceasefire. But then there is always the question that how meaningful is that ceasefire going to be? That for some days it has worked, and everybody is hopeful.

I was in Kashmir about three or four months back at the Kashmiri University and I was just amazed that it was total peace. Of course you could see the forces, you know, the forces are around, but one could move about in the city. I moved about in the entire city, and then two months later I find that again some incidents occurring.

And there was an interesting story which I might share with you. You know, it was the driver of the Vice Chancellor who was taking me round, so this driver's thesis is very important. I see some of these theses as very important at times. So I told him that what has really happened here, and his thesis was that, well, the people who were at the core of this, they were politically unhappy and therefore they resorted to this kind of violence, they were basically insiders, that is why it could take place, and now many of them have been taken into the forces. So as a result, what had happened is that these - you know the people doing the mischief, are a handful, and these people can recognise them. That was his thesis, and therefore now they're not venturing into Srinigar city, something would be happening at the outskirts, but they know that they will be identified. Earlier they couldn't be identified, so that was his thesis, which was very interesting I thought.

Bill Bunbury: I guess that's one way of restoring equilibrium isn't it?

Santosh Sareen: Yes. I mean that's very fruitful, however you restore it, but if you can. As a matter of fact, terrorism, if this is I think one of the attempts that has always gone on, if you can, and politicians always have conferences with the terrorists, they sit across tables, they're never then immediately arrested for their terrorist acts. They sit across because it's in the larger interests of restoring equilibrium.

Bill Bunbury: Santosh Sareen, and a place for equilibrium.

Author Rosemary Stevens offered us another place with "A View from a 100-foot Pole", hardly the site, I thought, where you'd retain a sense of equilibrium, but, let's see.

Rosemary Stevens: I chose that title because it's interesting that when we come inside ourselves, when we reflect, one would imagine that the view would be narrow, but in actual fact, the view is much broader than we might have imagined it to be, and this seems to be contradictory or paradoxical. But in fact we see much more broadly the more deeply we can come into ourselves.

Bill Bunbury: So you don't want to be overtaken by vertigo, you want to look horizontally?

Rosemary Stevens: Yes, that's right, yes, to get a broad perspective, and to not be so enclosed in one's own ego that one only sees a very narrow viewpoint. I think the deeper we go into ourselves, again paradoxically, the more we actually connect with other people, other nations and all of nature, which is a surprise.

Bill Bunbury: What's that got to do with the theme of "Beyond Good and Evil", which this conference has been looking at.

Rosemary Stevens: I think it's got a lot to do with it, because it's very easy for us to look at the world and see everything as happening out there. So good exists out there, evil exists out there, and really I think what we're doing is projecting ourselves onto the world. If we can turn our gaze within and look at our own make-up, observe ourselves more closely, take a little time to be still, and to see how the dramas of the world go on inside ourselves, that we are ourselves capable of a great deal of evil and a great deal of good, and I think it's very important to understand that, and until we understand our own capacity for both good and evil, only then do we have more compassion for what's going on in the world, instead of just judging it.

Bill Bunbury: To illustrate this, I think you cite the example of George Bush and Osama bin Laden being in one sense the same person.

Rosemary Stevens: Yes, because it's easy to look at the two and to think that they are opposites, they are enemies after all, but in actual fact, they both believe that evil exists out there, and that they are the people who are the embodiment of good, and that they believe they must go out there and conquer evil. But of course, this is a recipe for disaster.

Bill Bunbury: Now to follow your image of the 100-foot pole, that looks as if it would give you the big picture, but paradoxically you also enjoined us this morning to look at the small picture, the details. Now why is that important?

Rosemary Stevens: Yes, I think it's very important because what I was talking about is this importance of the soul. I think in a Western civilisation we focus very much on externals, on getting things done, achieving things, we have to have something to show for what we do, and we're terribly busy. And I think the danger of doing this - and I mean, well, to have an aside here, to say that yes, a lot can be achieved, and that's very good - but if we're doing all of that to the detriment of our soul life, there's going to be a cost that we have to pay.

And so this business of reflecting on tiny details, taking the time - as you see little children sometimes, they will stop and just gaze at a puddle, a shaft of light falling on the puddle, they're totally absorbed, and that's their soul giving them time to be nourished. It takes time for the soul to be nourished. I mean it's often the little details that get our attention, and I think that if we don't do that, then we end up with a whole heap of illnesses and disorders that are common in the West, like psychoses and neuroses, and physical illnesses. And yet it's easy to imagine that this inner life, this soul life, which actually needs detail and time, is unimportant, but I think it's extremely important.

Bill Bunbury: I was thinking about that even before I heard your paper, because this morning while I was waiting for my cab at the ABC, I noticed a beautiful piece of bark had fallen off one of the trees, and I thought, what a rich colour that is, what a wonderful pattern, and it quite distracted me from worrying about whether the taxi would be on time. Is that the sort of thing you mean?

Rosemary Stevens: That's exactly the sort of thing I mean, and I think it's extremely important to have time just to notice beauty. I think beauty is extremely important, it does much more for us than we can imagine.

Bill Bunbury: One of the things that you drew my attention to was the way in which Don Quixote, Cervantes' famous fantasy novel about Spain, illustrates the paradox of good and evil. Can we talk about that?

Rosemary Stevens: Yes, that's right. Well again, I thought it was a very intriguing thing that Cervantes himself wanted to write something didactic and moralistic, because he was very annoyed about the fact that he'd ended up in prison. Through no fault of his own, he'd ended up having to collect taxes, and then where he banked the money, that bank went bankrupt, and so he was put into prison, and he thought, well this is just typical of the sort of mess our country's got into, so he was going to write something quite moralistic and didactic.

But he himself was now imprisoned, and it's interesting that when we're in a state of restriction, we are forced in on ourselves, we're forced to be reflective, and to go deep inside. Often situations of suffering and difficulty bring us to this point. And while he was in that place and began to write, his intention of writing something moralistic changed completely, and something else came through him, and it was far more alive, and this turned out to be much more universal. So that we can read now what he wrote about Don Quixote, and it's as relevant now as it was then.

And I think this is what happens when you enter the soul dimension. It is much broader, and although it's entered through narrowness - in his case through penury, difficulty, restriction - somehow that seems to be the gateway to open to a much broader perspective. Don Quixote, of course, acts in a very crazy kind of way, it's exaggerated, and of course we laugh, we think that's ridiculous. But then he's always true to himself, he is a chivalrous knight, and he is going to live according to those rules, he's going to rescue damsels in distress, and that's what he does. He doesn't worry about if it's good, or if it's evil, he just does it, because this is what a knight errant does.

And I guess I gave the example of our politicians. I thought, well we just laugh and think that's ridiculous, but we can't dismiss it, because supposing our politicians were coming from the same place, they would say, no, there are asylum seekers on the high seas, leaky boats, we must go and rescue them, and they do this regardless of what opinion polls are going to say about it, or what the votes at the next election are going to be. And if you put it into that context, it makes us see it rather differently, and although we're laughing, we laugh because we think we couldn't be like that. But unfortunately, we couldn't, we're far more concerned with what people think, than just being true to ourselves to the degree that Don Quixote is.

That sense of seeing "the other", which Rosemary's just talked about, was also explored by Megumi Kato from Japan and Roger Bourke from Australia. Both have looked at fictional treatment of Australian attitudes towards the Japanese in the first half of the 20th Century. Megumi Kato led off with "Typical Evil", a representation of Japan and the Japanese in early 20th Century Australian literature.

Megumi Kato: They were invisible, sort of scary figures to Australian people and they were used I think by journalists and politicians to boost their nationalism as propaganda. And there are many scary invasion novels. You can see it in some of the illustrations in such publications as The Bulletin or The Lone Hand.

Bill Bunbury: So physically, how are the Japanese represented then? Do they look... ?

Megumi Kato: Oh yes, like a military soldier with a sword and looking at a small Australian boy, and he's trying to give this big seat of Australia.

Bill Bunbury: The theme of this conference is "Beyond Good and Evil"; is there a connection between these images that Australia has and a sense of "the other" as evil?

Megumi Kato: It's easy to make a typical easy dichotomy, East and West, evil and good, Christians and heathens.

Bill Bunbury: So Australians don't see Japanese as human then, they see them in a much more symbolic way?

Megumi Kato: Yes, I think they saw the Japanese as a symbol of evil, or an enemy, possible enemy, and future threat.

Bill Bunbury: And as you'll know of course, the threat arrives when Japan commences the big drive into South East Asia and threatens Australia. Conflict brings these two people together, does it change Australians' perception of Japanese?

Megumi Kato: In mainland Australia concepts won't change that quickly, but in the jungle or in the prisoners-of-war camps, there were direct contacts, which brought up human contact, direct contact, which generated, well maybe not real, but some small understanding.

Bill Bunbury: You described a bathing scene, which I thought was quite interesting. That's described in a novel, isn't it, where -

Megumi Kato: Yes, by Tom Hungerford.

Bill Bunbury: Can you talk about that?

Megumi Kato: Yes it was Australians on the patrol, and they were trying to position the Japanese, and then they saw some Japanese bathing in the river naked and splashing the water, and it was just like themselves. And that was a moment, a turning point for some of the soldiers to look at the Japanese, the enemy not an evil embodiment, but human beings as well.

Bill Bunbury: These notions you have in your paper, you've drawn them from literature. Is literature the same as the reality?

Megumi Kato: That's a very difficult question. Yes, well it's fiction of course so they can make it up, but why I read literature is that it can bring out the essence of the truth because of such a strong experience during the war. And I think many writers who experience war could write totally imaginative things.

Bill Bunbury: Megumi Kato, lecturer at Meisei University, Tokyo.

Roger Burke from the University of Western Australia, followed with a paper called "They Crucified Him" in which he explored New Testament images of Allied soldiers suffering at the hands of the Japanese in World War II. I asked him how these Christian images arose in what was, after all, secular writing for a general audience.

Roger Bourke: I think that's a very interesting question. I mean all of these writers - Neville Shute, Lesley Greener and G.H.E. Ballard - are drawing very much directly on the Bible, the gospel narratives of the New Testament. The fact that all of these authors are using such really extreme and very, very powerful religious Christian symbolism, does not at the same time imply that they themselves are expressing the statements of personal religious faith. That does not actually seem to be the case, which in itself is interesting.

So in other words, they're using the biblical gospel narratives in a symbolic way in these novels. A Town Like Alice is actually based very closely on research that Shute himself did in Queensland in 1948. He met a former Australian prisoner-of-war named Jim, or Ringer Edwards, who himself was a prisoner on the Burma-Thailand railway, was actually I believe, sentenced to death by the Japanese, with two of his mates, for killing native cattle and eating them as food. The men were actually strung up from a tree with fencing wire, and beaten with a baseball bat. Edwards managed to free one of his hands, but then his punishment was resumed with the fencing wire actually driven through his palms.

That, of course, seems to have suggested to Shute the whole idea of this being an image of the crucifixion. So you can see very clearly how Shute is actually mythologising, if you like, a particular historical event. The mere fact that Shute introduces it, not only the word but a description of the scene of a crucifixion, into his novel is actually intended to have a far deeper, semi-religious, purpose, although as I said it's not a statement of personal religious faith significance.

Bill Bunbury: The interesting aspect of this is you're not dealing with gods who are crucified, you're not dealing with the hanging God image, you're dealing with ordinary soldiers, so how does this transfiguration, if you'll pardon the phrase, come about?

Roger Bourke: There isn't a simple answer to that, and that's not something that I've actually considered in detail, but I think that you have to bear in mind here that there is a difference, a very fundamental difference, between the literature of the Second World War and the literature of, say, the First World War and earlier periods.

I think that a partial answer to your question is that we're in a much more modern secular period here, post-1945. And it's a period in which meaning, in the sense of traditional meaning of the Bible having its literal meaning, is actually far more problematic for all authors, and this applies equally to Neville Shute as it does to much more literary sophisticated authors, because the world has changed. I mean we've had Hiroshima, we've had Auschwitz, and it seems that the old meanings simply no longer apply, and this of course is reflected in the literature of the Second World War.

Bill Bunbury: We even get echoes of this in a way in the First World War, don't we? We get Wilfred Owen writing about Abraham sacrificing his son. Is there a connection, then, between the soldier as victim of war, and the sense of crucifixion as an expression of that?

Roger Bourke: Absolutely. I think that's absolutely true. Wilfred Owen is important, because he was one of the poets of the First World War who actually introduced and popularised the whole idea of the soldier as a Christ figure, and that's something that really comes into Western literature with the war poets of the First World War.

Bill Bunbury: Roger Bourke and crucifixion Images from two world wars.

But the end of World War II left us with a new non-biblical image, except perhaps an apocalyptic one, the mushroom cloud of the world's first atomic weapon, a weapon which fell on civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, and at the time was judged a riposte to Japanese wartime atrocities.

Now when we speak of atrocities, we also have to think of what some people still also regard as an atrocity, which is the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the war, and Australians of course come in to Japan after that in the Occupation. Have you found any evidence through literature and perhaps through a reality of how that affected their attitudes towards what had happened?

Megumi Kato: Yes. From what I've seen written by some prisoners in Japan, when they saw the remains of the atrocities, it's obvious that they started to sympathise with the Japanese. They don't see Japan and the Japanese as evil or diabolical, and it was another turning point for them to look at, as I said, Poor, poor bastard, out of human beings, not abstract enemies.

Bill Bunbury: One of the conclusions you draw is the question of whether it takes a war to teach us about each other.

Megumi Kato: Of course there are no ifs in history, so what happened, happened. And what I'm trying to look for is the good results from the total devastation of war, and everything evil about the war, but still there were things like the Japanese war brides in Australia, who became a small tip of changing the White Australia Policy. War, of course, it should be avoided by any means, but still we may have to learn from something destructive to a constructive way of our future society.

Bill Bunbury: Rubak Borah, completing a PhD at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, has studied a much more contemporary conflict, the struggle between Muslim dissidents and the Filipino government in the southernmost island of the Philippines, Mindanao. It's an example, as he sees it, of a long-standing and unresolved problem with consequences for the world beyond Mindanao's shores. He began with a long and bitter history of that island.

Rubak Borah: This is inhabited by a group of people who are called the Moros, and this name was incidentally given to them by the Spaniards who took this name from a similar group of people called the Moors in northern African who had colonised Spain for a period of around 700 years, and they had put up a very spirited resistance against the Spaniards. So initially the Spaniards gave them this name, Moros, derived from the Moors.

Now the history of Islam in these Moro inhabited areas, it precedes the Spanish colonisation. Islam was introduced into these areas by an Arab missionary, Con Man Dung, in around 1200 and after the Spanish colonisation in 1521, they made tremendous attempts to spread Catholicism. But these Moros put up a resistance then as well, so after this transfer of these areas to the United States after Spain lost the war with the United States in 1898, the sovereignty over these areas was given to the United States. But even then, the United States was unable to bring these areas under their full control.

At the time of the independence of the Philippines, the leaders from these areas, the elders, they made a representation to the United States government that they would be given separate rights, with independence, but the United States rejected this proposal.

Now the history of the recent modern Moro Movement, it started in the 1960s with a small group of students and intellectuals who voiced their resentment against the discrimination, the neglect and the overall total lack of interest of the government in Manila, and the development of this region. This region has the highest number of maternal and infant mortalities, the lowest literacy rate, in the entire country of the Philippines, and in spite of having tremendous economic potential, they had the Javeda massacre in which 20 Muslim youths, Moro youths who had joined the Philippine army, were executed on charges of mutiny.

Bill Bunbury: In a way this sounds like a breeding ground for dissent then. People are poor, they're neglected, Islam is their religion, whereas most of the population of the Philippines is Catholic. Is this one of the major causes of the problem, poverty as well as religion?

Rubak Borah: Yes, if you see the causes of insurgency everywhere, poverty and illiteracy, these are two of the main factors which act as the breeding ground for insurgency, not only in the Philippines, most of the insurgencies of the world. Besides there are also some other factors at work in the Philippines. There is a arms pipe-line in the region from Cambodia to Thailand which feeds the insurgencies in the entire region, which supplies arms to the Moro insurgents, the insurgents in Aceh, the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka and the Pathan United Liberation Organisation.

And the fact that during the time of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, a lot of Moro youths together with youths from other countries like Malaysia and Indonesia, went to Afghanistan after being trained in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and some of them in Eastern countries, to fight against the Soviets.

And from there they imbibed this Jihadi spirit which continued even after the downfall of the Soviets in Afghanistan. They came back here, they set up camps. But now, though this movement started off at the regional level, as of now it has joined hands with the international Islamic terrorist movement which has also got South East Asia in its web. So if you see they have in the rest of Jamaah Islamiah militants in the Philippines, you would be knowing that Jemaah Islimiah was involved in the Bali bombings and the recent Jakarta blasts and the armed forces of the Philippines during their raids on the Moro Islamic Liberation front and the MNLF comes before that. So you see that this is not a regional movement but has become a part of the international Islamist terrorist network.

Bill Bunbury: It's like a tumour that's grown a lot bigger.

Rubak Borah: Yes.

Bill Bunbury: Is there a solution to this within the Philippines itself?

Rubak Borah: There is no concrete solution which I can point at, but there are some steps which can definitely help to alleviate the problem. One would be a further devolution. The government also recognises that it cannot allow independence because this would set off chain reactions all over South East Asia. So independence is definitely not the solution, but the thing would be a greater devolution of powers.

Another thing is to improve the level of development, set up infrastructure, get education to the children, and allow the people to develop more and more contacts with people from the other parts of the Philippines, because as of now, they have been restricted to their own areas with no movement whatsoever. But there should be more movement, more interaction between the people.

And the government policies should also change, because one of the reasons which started it all was the large-scale immigration from the northern and other central parts of the country of the Philippines to the southern regions which upset the entire demographic bounds and the Moros, they found themselves in their own land they had to work very hard to eke out a living.

Bill Bunbury: So it's not just a matter of religion, it's a matter of government and the way government handles its population?

Rubak Borah: Yes, it's not a matter of religion, it's a matter of economics, it's a matter of geography. It's how the government handled the religion, because there were fierce attempts to subdue the indigenous religions, the religion of the Moros. The role of the military has also left a lot to be desired because they often have been accused, and rightly so, of high handedness, when it comes to these anti-insurgency operations because one has to realise even if there is an insurgency movement in these areas, not everyone is an insurgent, not everyone is a militant. There are saner voices among the people and these voices need to be heard.

Bill Bunbury: This conference is called "Beyond Good and Evil", and you've offered your paper within that context. What for you is the connection between this theme, and what you've just described?

Rubak Borah: In the present context and the context of the war against terrorism, where the President of the United States, George Bush, has categorised some countries as being in the axis of evi, and said that he would ride over them, or with us, this conference is set against this background. And what may be evil for somebody may be good for somebody else. It depends on which side of the divide you are on.

But it's not necessarily every time that you can dominate or you can settle a problem by use of force, as the United States is now finding out in Iraq where the going is getting tougher every day. It's not just military force which can settle a problem. The solution is in having respect for each other's religions, each other's cultures, each other's way of life whether they're in a minority or whether they're in a majority.

Bill Bunbury: Rubak Borah from JN University, Delhi.

This symposium with its 2003 theme, "Beyond Good and Evil, or Trapped Within Them?", was the 10th biennial gathering at the University of Western Australia to discuss Culture and Society in the Asia-Pacific region. Edwin Thumboo, Emeritus Professor at the University of Singapore and Dennis Haskell, Professor of English at the University of Western Australia, talked about what they were hoping for in 2003.

First, Edwin Thumboo.

Edwin Thumboo: I think we, all of us, tend to look at other people, other experiences, whether contemporary or something out of the past, through our own experiences, through our own understanding, our own perceptions. The I, the individual, he himself is a product of a particular semiotic, a particular environment, the microcosm, to use an old-fashioned but still useful word, and you are the macrocosm. So when you look at another civilisation, you tend to assume that its values, its procedures, the way it does things, the way it treats the past, the way it prioritises its culture, its economics, its value system and so on, is like yours. And that is seldom the case.

Bill Bunbury: You may miss it altogether, mightn't you? I remember being in Pakistan in 1980 and the BBC series Civilisation was on, and the Pakistani friends I'd made were quite speechless, because it was only about European civilisation.

Edwin Thumboo: Yes. Quite often you see books you know, Mathematics in the World, and there's nothing about mathematics in India or China or for that matter, the Arab mathematicians that invented algebra, calculus, and so on. You're absolutely right.

Bill Bunbury: Dennis, in drawing together this conference, you picked on a particular theme and I'm interested in the words, "Beyond Good and Evil". You in a sense add a rider there, don't you?

Dennis Haskell: Well we thought, of course, of Bush talking about the axis of evil as if evil was this absolute and clearly-defined concept, so it fits in very neatly with what Edwin's saying. And the other allusion which is in there is to Nietzsche, and in Nietzsche's thought "Beyond Good and Evil", he thought good and evil were just terms people made up, and you defined them as you defined them. So they didn't have any kind of intrinsic meaning. And the notion of this being something which was relative and had to be questioned, seemed to me firmly in place, and then, hullo, the world turns around and we've got an absolute notion of what's evil and what's an axis of good as well.

Bill Bunbury: So if we take that phrase, Edwin, the axis of evil applied to North Korea, Iran and Iraq, you observe that the simple reminds, but the complex instructs. Can we relate it to phrases like the axis of evil?

Edwin Thumboo: Yes. Firstly they are too clear-cut, and also there is this assumption that evil is something, as Dennis has suggested, which is it's wrong when you say evil is something that is absolute. There is no predetermined or universal or permanent definition. There are broad parameters, for instance - it's not good to kill, it's good to help, and so on. These are universal values.

But my feeling is that unless you know the details of a culture, that's why I said the detail instructs, the generalisations are the most dangerous things to go in for, and when President Bush uses the axis of evil, you try to apply that formula to North Korea, and try to apply it to Iran, and so on, you find that he's referring to quite different things, and trying to put very different things into a single equation. And that equation itself can be very damaging, it can be very, very off-putting. North Korea, given the history from after the Second World War, has every reason to be suspicious of America. And America has got far less reasons to be suspicious of North Korea.

Bill Bunbury: Dennis, this conference is obviously concerned with literature and its role in that. What role do you think literature has in this situation where you are trying to look beyond good and evil?

Dennis Haskell: I think literature involves the most complex and deepest understandings. I think that literature actually gets to deeper understandings even than philosophy, so it's a way of tapping in to beliefs and values which the writers in fact, when they're writing - Edwin and I are both writers so I think we'd say this - you don't actually know that you think or feel bad until you get the words on the page, and so it involves going deep. It involves drawing on the unconscious and it's such a contrast, that kind of understanding which involves subtleties and sorts of connotations Edwin was talking about in language, which is just at the other end of the spectrum to an absolute axis of evil and a lot of the kind of political comment that you're getting now which is just like drawing up grid lines.

Bill Bunbury: I was thinking as I've been listening to various papers how important language is, isn't it? And we seem to be getting the feeling that words are the key and the way we use words. Would you like to comment on that, Edwin?

Edwin Thumboo: Well Yeats in a very early poem has a line "Words alone are certain good", and if you look at the history of the major religions, the word has always been central. You begin with a word and you end with a word, and as Dennis has pointed out, literature uses a word in perhaps the most comprehensive way. The best in language and the worst in language are found in literature, and it's the best that instructs you, that teaches you. As I said, how do you configure and experience if you don't have the language?

Dennis Haskell: We think in language, it's the way we get our deepest meanings, and the notion, the Christian notion of the word as a sort of logos is there in just about all of religions, I think - perhaps less in Buddhism where you sort of shift away from language. But I think it's just we might think in images, we might in dreams for example, we might communicate in images through film or painting, but the depth of meaning in range of meaning, really comes through language.

So it's not just a matter of expressiveness and lively language. If you can't use language, you can't think. And that's the end of it. I must confess that there are times listening to, I don't want to pick on Bush all the time, but as a President, you wonder if the statements are this simple all the time, is he just a good media savvy character, or is it that he actually can't think?

Bill Bunbury: There's a dilemma here though, isn't there, because we accuse people like Bush of using emotive language, axis of evil and so on, these words have powerful connotations, and yet we're also enjoined, aren't we, to use language in a powerful way. We almost want to use language empathetically.

Dennis Haskell: I think that's entirely true. With Bush it's not the emotiveness, it's a simplicity that gets me. You could have very simple and quite emotional language, and sometimes, some of the best poetry is, well I'd say, I don't know what Edwin would say, but I'd say the hardest poetry to write for the poetry to work, has to have emotional power, the hardest to write is the simplest.

Edwin Thumboo: You think of Robert Frost, he's a classic example, crafted, quiet, almost understated and yet if you meditate upon what he says, you find that his poems reach into you and his poems help you, not only do they reach into you, they also help you to reach out.

Bill Bunbury: So do you have "miles to go before you sleep, and promises to keep"?

Edwin Thumboo: Oh yes, I think all of us have miles to go and promises to keep because if we don't have those things, we are not living, we are not thinking, we are not existing, we are not being.

Bill Bunbury: Edwin Thumboo and Dennis Haskell summing up the 2003 symposium from the University of Western Australia, with its theme, "Beyond Good and Evil or Trapped Within Them?" My thanks to Dennis Haskell and Pamina Rich for their help with recording coverage of the conference. Studio production, David Lemay. I'm Bill Bunbury, and you've been with Encounter on ABC Radio National.

FX: Balinese music

Guests

Bruce Bennett

is Professor of English at the University of New South Wales, based at ADFA, Canberra. Co-founder with Edwin Thumboo of the Asia- Pacific Forum Culture & Society in the Asia-Pacific Region. Recent publications include Australian Short Fiction; a history (2002), Resistance and Reconciliation; Writing in the Commonwealth (2003), & The Oxford Literary History of Australia (2003).

Rubak Borah

is a Ph.D Student at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi. Currently preparing a thesis, "Managing Separatism - A study of the Moros in the Philippines".

Megumi Kato

is a Lecturer at Meisei University in Tokyo. She is currently preparing a thesis on "Representations of Japan & Japanese people in Australian Literature".

Dennis Haskell

is Professor of English at the University of Western Australia. Recent publications include One Pleasure Of Hell & Whose Singapore? Writing in the Commonwealth (2003) ed. Bruce Bennett.

Edwin Thumboo

is Emeritus Professor Centre for the Arts, at Singapore University, poet. and Co-founder with Bruce Bennett of the Asia-Pacific Forum Culture & Society in the Asia-pacific Region. Recent publications include Friend, anthology of his own poetry (2003).

Rosemary Stevens

is a novelist, author of Hellflowers.

Roger Bourke

is a Ph.D student at the University of Western Australia. He is currently preparing a thesis,"The Last Subject in the World - Fiction of the POW experience under the Japanese".

Santosh Sareen

is Professor of English at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, India. Recent publications include South East Asian Love Poetry (1994), &Contemporary Australian Short Stories (2001).